Most people, including musicians and music enthusiasts, have had many frustrating and disappointing experiences with buying merchandise at live shows or events. They found the buying process to be generally inconvenient and requiring some planning ahead of time, ultimately taking away from at least some part of their viewing experience of the event. Fans are always burdened with having to decide which part of the show they're going to cut out and miss so that they can wait in line to buy merchandise related to the event. Then, the fans are stuck carrying around whatever they bought for the rest of the night, or risk losing it.
There are several problems fans are continually faced with when trying to buy merchandise at shows or other events. Often times, lines are long and waiting is undesirable, when a fan can be watching the show they paid to see instead. Even when the fan chooses to miss out on parts of the show to wait in long lines, products are usually sold out and the customer is forced to forgo buying the shirt she/he really wanted or settle on a size that doesn't fit. Other times, the vendor only accepts cash, leaving the customer who only brought a credit card unable to make a purchase. If the fans do successfully buy something, they are stuck carrying the items around for the rest of the night with the risk of accidently leaving them somewhere in the venue. Once the fans have left the venue, they no longer have access to the items on sale exclusively at the event. Also vendors must guess at the number and sizes of apparel that will sell at a specific event to plan for an appropriate inventory. These are problems that not only occur at live music events, but can be an issue for attendees to almost any live event where exclusive event-only merchandise is sold (for instance at a playoff game, a championship sporting event, a conference or training session, an invitation-only event, an amusement park or zoo, a museum or art gallery, etc.
Fans aren't the only ones experiencing problems when it comes to live event commerce; selling merchandise at shows is a less than seamless process for merchandise companies, labels and artists as well. When planning for a tour or show, artists and labels have to order a majority of the merchandise they plan to sell while on the road ahead of time. This means they usually have to estimate how much of each item they will need, leading them to have excess amounts of undesirable items and not enough of products in higher demand by the end of their run. At the same time, merchandise companies have to spend their time producing these products upfront using unnecessary amounts of materials, only leaving them to go to waste. With traditional methods of selling merchandise at live events, merchandise companies, labels and artists aren't reaching the optimal amount of customers because they are missing out on all the fans who choose to watch the show instead of wait in line to buy something. Not only are they missing out on these customers during the show, but once a fan leaves the show, they lose out on them as a customer altogether.